Recollections of a Varied Life Part 18

I pushed toward him the sheets I had written and bade him read them while I went on writing. Before he left a telegram came from the office asking what the t.i.tle of the story was to be, in order that the paper, going to press that night, might carry with it a flaming announcement of its beginning in the next number.

[Sidenote: "A Man of Honor"]

From beginning to end the story was written in that hurried way, each instalment going into type before the next was written. Meanwhile, I had the editorial conduct of the paper to look after and the greater part of the editorial page to write each week.

The necessary result was a crude, ill-considered piece of work, amateurish in parts, and wholly lacking in finish throughout. Yet it proved acceptable as a serial, and when it came out in book form ten thousand copies were sold on advance orders. The publishers were satisfied; the public seemed satisfied, and as for the author, he had no choice but to rest content with results for which he could in no way account then, and cannot account now.

The nearest approach to an explanation I have ever been able to imagine is that the t.i.tle--"A Man of Honor"--was a happy one. Of that there were many proofs then and afterwards. The story had been scarcely more than begun as a serial, when Edgar Fawcett brought out a two or three number story with the same t.i.tle, in _Appletons' Journal_, I think. Then Dion Boucicault cribbed the t.i.tle, attached it to a play he had "borrowed"

from some French dramatist, and presented the whole as his own.

Finally, about a dozen years later, a curious thing happened. I was acting at the time as a literary adviser of Harper & Brothers. There was no international copyright law then, but when a publisher bought advance sheets of an English book and published it here simultaneously or nearly so with its issue in England, a certain courtesy of the trade forbade other reputable publishing houses to trespa.s.s. The Harpers kept two agents in London, one of them to send over advance sheets for purchase, and the other to send books as they were published.

One day among the advance sheets sent to me for judgment I found a novel by Mrs. Stannard, the lady who wrote under the pen name of John Strange Winter. It was a rather interesting piece of work, but it bore my t.i.tle, "A Man of Honor." In advising its purchase I entered my protest against the use of that t.i.tle in the proposed American edition. Of course the protest had no legal force, as our American copyright law affords no protection to t.i.tles, but with an honorable house like the Harpers the moral aspect of the matter was sufficient.

The situation was a perplexing one. The Harpers had in effect already bought the story from Mrs. Stannard for American publication. They must publish simultaneously with the English appearance of the novel or lose all claim to the protection of the trade courtesy. There was not time enough before publication day for them to communicate with the author and secure a change of t.i.tle.

In this perplexity Mr. Joseph W. Harper, then the head of the house and a personal friend of my own, asked me if I would consent to the use of the t.i.tle if he should print a footnote on the first page of the book, setting forth the fact of my prior claim to it and saying that the firm was indebted to my courtesy for the privilege of using it.

I readily consented to this and the book appeared in that way. A little later, in a letter, Mrs. Stannard sent me some pleasant messages, saying especially that she had found among her compatriots no such courteous reasonableness in matters of the kind as I had shown. By way of ill.u.s.tration she said that some years before, when she published "Houp-la," she had been compelled to pay heavy damages to an obscure writer who had previously used the t.i.tle in some insignificant provincial publication, never widely known and long ago forgotten.

In the case of "A Man of Honor" the end was not yet. Mrs. Stannard's novel with that t.i.tle and the footnote was still in its early months of American circulation when one day I found among the recently published English novels sent to me for examination one by John Strange Winter (Mrs. Stannard) ent.i.tled, "On March." Upon examining it I found it to be the same that the Harpers had issued with the "Man of Honor" t.i.tle. I suppose that after the correspondence above referred to, Mrs. Stannard had decided to give the English edition of her work this new t.i.tle, but had omitted to notify the Harpers of the change.

[Sidenote: A "Warlock" on the Warpath]

Mention of this matter of trouble with t.i.tles reminds me of a rather curious case which amused me at the time of its occurrence and may amuse the reader. In the year 1903 I published a novel ent.i.tled "The Master of Warlock." During the summer of that year I one day received a registered letter from a man named Warlock, who wrote from somewhere in Brooklyn.

The missive was brief and peremptory. Its writer ordered me to withdraw the book from circulation instantly, and warned me that no more copies of it were to be sold. He offered no reason for his commands and suggested no explanation of his authority to give them. I wrote asking him upon what ground he a.s.sumed to interfere, and for reply he said briefly: "My grounds are personal and legal." Beyond that he did not explain.

He had written in the same way to the publishers of the book, who answered him precisely as I had done.

A month later there came another registered letter from him. In it he said that a month had pa.s.sed since his demand was made and that as I had paid no heed to it, he now repeated it. He said he was armed with adequate proof that many copies of the book had been sold during that month--a statement which I am glad to say was true. There must now be a prompt and complete withdrawal of the novel from the market, he said.

This time the peremptory gentleman graciously gave me at least a hint of the ground upon which he claimed a right to order the suppression of the novel. He said I ought to know that I had no right to make use of any man's surname in fiction, especially when it was a unique name like his own.

As I was pa.s.sing the summer at my Lake George cottage, I sent him a note saying that I should continue in my course, and giving him the address of a lawyer in New York who would accept service for me in any action he might bring.

For a time thereafter I waited anxiously for the inst.i.tution of his suit. I foresaw a great demand for the book as a consequence of it, and I planned to aid in that. I arranged with some of my newspaper friends in New York to send their cleverest reporters to write of the trial.

Charles Henry Webb--"John Paul," who wrote the burlesques, "St.

Twelvemo" and "Liffith Lank"--proposed to take up on his own account Mr. Warlock's contention that the novelist has no right to use any man's surname in a novel, and make breezy fun of it by writing a novelette upon those lines. In his preface he purposed to set forth the fact that there is scarcely any conceivable name that is not to be found in the New York City directory, and that even a name omitted from that widely comprehensive work, was pretty sure to belong to somebody somewhere, so that under the Warlock doctrine its use must involve danger. He would show that the novelist must therefore designate his personages as "Thomas Ex Square," "Tabitha Twenty Three," and so on with a long list of mathematical impersonalities. Then he planned to give a sample novel written in that way, in which the dashing young cavalier, Charles Augustus + should make his pa.s.sionate addresses to the fascinating Lydia =, only to learn from her tremulous lips that she was already betrothed to the French n.o.bleman, Compte [Symbol: cube root]y.

Unhappily Mr. Warlock never inst.i.tuted his suit; John Paul lost an opportunity, and the public lost a lot of fun.

By way of completing the story of this absurdity, it is worth while to record that the novel complained of had no personage in it bearing the name of Warlock. In the book that name was merely the designation by which a certain Virginia plantation was known.

XLIV

[Sidenote: "Pike County Ballads"]

During our early struggles to secure a place for _Hearth and Home_ in popular favor, I was seized with a peculiarly vaulting ambition. John Hay's "Pike County Ballads" were under discussion everywhere. Phrases from them were the current coin of conversation. Critics were curiously studying them as a new and effective form of literature, and many pious souls were in grave alarm over what they regarded as blasphemy in Mr.

Hay's work, especially the phrase "a durned sight better business than loafin' round the throne," at the end of "Little Breeches."

I knew Mr. Hay slightly. Having ceased for a time to hold diplomatic place, he was a working writer then, with his pen as his one source of income. I made up my mind to secure a Pike County Ballad for _Hearth and Home_ even though the cost of it should cause our publishers the loss of some sleep. Knowing that his market was a good one for anything he might choose to write, I went to him with an offer such as few writers, if any at that time, had ever received, thinking to outbid all others who might have designs upon his genius.

It was of no use. He said that the price offered "fairly took his breath away," but told me with the emphasis of serious a.s.surance, that he "could not write a Pike County Ballad to save his life." "That was what they call a 'pocket mine,'" he added, "and it is completely worked out."

He went on to tell me the story of the Ballads and the circ.u.mstances in which they were written. As he told me the same thing more in detail many years later, adding to it a good many little reminiscences, I shall draw upon the later rather than the earlier memory in writing of the matter here.

It was in April, 1902, when he was at the height of his brilliant career as Secretary of State that I visited him by invitation. In the course of a conversation I reminded him of what he had told me about thirty years before, concerning the genesis of the ballads, and said:

"I wonder if you would let me print that story? It seems to me something the public is ent.i.tled to share."

He responded without hesitation:

"Certainly. Print it by all means if you wish, and in order that you may get it right after all these years, I'll tell it to you again. It came about in this way: I was staying for a time at a hospitable country house, and on a hot summer Sunday I went with the rest to church where I sleepily listened to a sermon. In the course of it the good old parson--who hadn't a trace of humorous perception in his make-up, droned out a story substantially the same as that in 'Little Breeches.'

"As I sat there in the sleepy sultriness of the summer Sunday, in an atmosphere that seemed redolent of roasting pine pews and scorching cushion covers, I fell to thinking of Pike County methods of thought, of what humor a Pike County dialect telling of that story would have, and of what impression the story itself, as solemnly related by the preacher, would make upon the Pike County mind. There are two Pike Counties, you know--one in Illinois and the other confronting it across the river, in Missouri. But the people of the two Pike Counties are very much alike--isomeric, as the chemists say--and they have a dialect speech, a point of view, and an intellectual att.i.tude in common, and all their own. I have encountered nothing else like it anywhere.

[Sidenote: John Hay's Own Story of the Ballads]

"When I left the church that Sunday, I was full to the lips of an imaginary Pike County version of the preacher's story, and on the train as I journeyed to New York, I entertained myself by writing 'Little Breeches.' The thing was done merely for my own amus.e.m.e.nt, without the smallest thought of print. But when I showed it to Whitelaw Reid he seized upon the ma.n.u.script and published it in the _Tribune_.

"By that time the lilt and swing of the Pike County Ballad had taken possession of me. I was filled with the Pike County spirit, as it were, and the humorous side of my mind was entertained by its rich possibilities. Within a week after the appearance of 'Little Breeches'

in print all the Pike County Ballads were written. After that the impulse was completely gone from me. There was absolutely no possibility of another thing of the kind. When you asked me for something of that kind for _Hearth and Home_, I told you truly that I simply could not produce it. There were no more Pike County Ballads in me, and there never have been any since.

"Let me tell you a queer thing about that. From the hour when the last of the ballads was written until now, I have never been able to feel that they were mine, that my mind had had anything to do with their creation, or that they bore any trace of kinship to my thought or my intellectual impulses. They seem utterly foreign to me--as foreign as if I had first encountered them in print, as the work of somebody else. It is a strange feeling. Of course every creative writer feels something of the sort with regard to much of his work, but I, at least, have never had the feeling one-tenth so strongly with regard to anything else I ever did.

"Now, let me tell you," Mr. Hay continued, "of some rather interesting experiences I have had with respect to the ballads. One day at the Gilsey House, in New York, I received the card of a gentleman, and when he came to my room he said:

"'I am the son of the man whom you celebrated in one of your ballads as Jim Bludso, the engineer who stuck to his duty and declared he would "hold her nozzle agin the bank till the last galoot's ash.o.r.e."'"

Mr. Hay added:

"This gave me an opportunity. Mark Twain had criticised the ballad, saying that Jim Bludso must have been a pilot, and not an engineer, for the reason that an engineer, having once set his engines going, could have no need to stay by them. In view of this criticism, I asked my visitor concerning it, telling him of what Mark Twain had said. For answer the caller a.s.sured me that the original Jim Bludso was in fact an engineer. He explained that as a Mississippi River steamboat has two engines, each turning an independent wheel, and as the current of the river is enormously swift, it was necessary for the engineer to remain at his post, working one engine and then the other, backing on one sometimes and going ahead on the other, if her nozzle was to be held 'agin the bank till the last galoot's ash.o.r.e.'"

[Sidenote: Some Anecdotes from John Hay]

For reply to this I told Mr. Hay that I had seen in a Memphis cemetery a tombstone erected to a pilot, and inscribed with the story of his heroic death in precisely Jim Bludso's spirit. At the time that I read the inscription on it, "Jim Bludso" had not been written, but the matter interested me and I made inquiry for the exact facts. The story as I heard it was this: The boat being afire the pilot landed her, head-on against a bank that offered no facilities for making her fast with cables. The only way to get the "galoots ash.o.r.e" was for the pilot to remain at his post and ring his engine bells for going ahead and backing, so as to "hold her nozzle agin the bank." But the flames were by that time licking the rear of the pilot house, and the captain frantically entreated the pilot to leap from the forward part of the structure to the deck below. This the heroic fellow refused to do so long as the safety of the pa.s.sengers required his presence at his post.

He stood there, calmly smoking his cigar and coolly ringing his bells as occasion required till at last every other human being on board had been saved. By that time the flames had completely enveloped the pilot-house, and there was left no possible way of escape. Then relinquishing his hold upon the wheel, the pilot folded his arms and stood like a statue until the floor beneath him gave way and he sank to a cruel death in the furnace-like fire below.

The details of the story were related to me by Captain John Cannon, of the steamer "Robert E. Lee," and the weather-beaten old navigator was not ashamed of the tears that trickled down his cheeks as he told the tale.

When I had finished, Mr. Hay said:

"That only means that we have two heroes to revere instead of one. Jim Bludso was an engineer."

Continuing his talk of coincidences, Mr. Hay said: